Briefing on Democratic Republic of Congo

INTRODUCTION

Monday, October 27, 2003

Jerry Fowler, director of the Committee on Conscience, talks with Cliff Bernath, Steven Smith, and Learned Dees about the UN response to the crisis in the Congo.

EVENT

JERRY FOWLER: My name is Jerry Fowler and I’m the Staff Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience and I’d like to welcome you this afternoon to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The mandate of the Committee on Conscience is to alert the national conscience, influence policymakers and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide and related crimes against humanity.

And it was actually part of the original vision of Elie Wiesel and the founders of the museum when they recommended to President Carter in 1979 the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial. They said to President Carter that a memorial unresponsive to the future would violate the memory of the past and so they recommended creation of the Committee on Conscience that would address contemporary threats of genocide and our mandate also includes the somewhat ill-defined category of related crimes against humanity.

That recommendation was actually set aside in the years that the museum was being built and, as you probably know, the museum opened in 1993 and so it has just marked as tenth anniversary. And 1993 coincided with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and then a year to the month after the museum opened the Rwanda genocide occurred which I’m sure this audience is very familiar with.

And it reaffirmed the original vision of Elie Wiesel and the founders that a memorial could not just look backwards, that it also had to look at the world that it lived in. And so the Committee on Conscience was created in 1995 and then I had the privilege to be appointed as the first staff director in 1999. And since that time we’ve been trying to more systematically build up this aspect of the museum’s work, and we’ve looked at a number of situations, including Sudan, Chechnya, and Central Africa. We’re only recently started to focus specifically on Congo.

This is the second of a series of forums that we’ll continue to do as long as there’s a need for it. The first was held on June 6th and we titled it Sequel to Genocide: The Crisis in Eastern Congo, in part to underscore that the events happening today in Eastern Congo are not happening in a vacuum, that in large part they have grown out of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

The proceedings of that forum will be posted to our website momentarily, very soon, and our website is www.committeeonconscience.org, and you’ll find there also transcripts from other programs that we’ve held as well as the opportunity to sign up for our electronic newsletter, which will keep you apprised of events that we host here.

Since we held that June 6th forum there has been a number of very important developments starting with the deployment of a French led multi-national force in the town of Bunia in Ituri Province which at least in that very limited geographical area by all reports stabilized where they were which was a very small part of even that one province.

And shortly after that the United Nations Security Council voted to expand the UN force that had already been in Congo, so-called MONUC, and bolster its mandate. And in early September, the French force handed off to the reinforced MONUC. They call it MONUC II? Cliff is going to talk in more detail about this.

Meanwhile, a transitional government was set up in Kinshasa that includes representatives of some of the rebel groups that are fighting in Eastern Congo. And then just most recently over this weekend there were stories in both the New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Washington Post about Congo, the one in the Post in particular dealing with the use of mass rape, which is consistent with reports by many, many groups, that women have been particularly targets of a campaign of rape in Eastern Congo.

To bring us up to date on what is happening in Congo and what things look like for the near future we’re very pleased to have a distinguished panel of speakers who have all returned from Congo within the last couple of months, Cliff Bernath, Director of Conflict Resolution and Prevention, and I wonder why it’s not prevention and resolution, Steven Smith, who’s an independent Africa analyst previously with Refugees International for quite some time, and to my left, Learned Dees, who’s Senior Program Officer for the National Endowment for Democracy.

They’ll be speaking in that order, from my right to left, and each of them will speak for about 15 minutes or 20 minutes, and then we’ll have time for questions and discussion. So without further ado, welcome to the panel, and I’ll hand it off to you, Cliff.

CLIFF BERNATH: Thanks, Jerry, thanks to the Committee for Conscience for sponsoring us, and thanks also to all of you for braving the weather and getting here today. When my colleague Anne Edgerton and I went to the Congo about a year ago last November we came back and we put out this report here which basically said things in the Congo are bad and they’re getting worse.

I went again with two other colleagues from RI. We got back the second week of September and we wrote another report, the one that you’ve got a copy of here, and the theme of that one was things are still bad but they’re getting better, and that’s what we’re going to talk about a little bit this afternoon.

Last year when we reported we talked about the mass killings that were going on, the displacements of hundreds of thousands of people. The forced cannibalizations were in the media at the time and the inaccessibility of most of the Eastern DRC to humanitarian workers. The government in Kinshasa at that time had almost no authority outside of Kinshasa, certainly not in the eastern part of the country where in some places some of the different rebel forces were issuing license plates for automobiles. They actually stamped our passports in different areas. My passport has a DRC stamp in it. And so there was no government outside of Kinshasa in the east.

MONUC’s military, at the time, was only 4600 troops. They didn’t have the mandate and they didn’t have the manpower to really impact on the situation at all. And in May of 2003 things got worse. The rebel forces came into Bunia. They killed 429 people. They drove 150,000 from their homes. They looted about 80 percent of the houses in Bunia. And again MONUC, even though it had a 700-person Uruguayan force there, really had no ability to impact and they did not impact at that time.

So in reaction to what was going on in May Kofi Annan called on the French and said we need some help. We need a rapid reaction force to get there. The French said yes, we’ll do it but we’ll do it under the auspices of the European Union. And on May 30th the resolution was signed in the UN giving them a Chapter 7 authorization. Six days later the IEMF [Interim Emergency Multinational Force] showed up. The first troops showed up.

So what happened in that year that’s changed a little bit, and there are some good signs of change, both along the political and the economic spectra? Politically at the national level you do have the transitional government that’s being set up in Kinshasa and it incorporates a lot of the rebel players so that they have a say in what’s going on there.

Most of the government and rebel leaders have agreed on a national army structure and a power sharing plan and for the first time we can see the rebels have some sense that they have more to gain through the political process than they do through continued fighting and atrocities.

And the Kinshasa government is indeed spreading to the east, at least in a small way, and everybody’s hoping that it grows. The Interim Ituri Authority in Bunia, a civil government, is being set up under the guidance of the senior representative to the Secretary General Ambassador Swing.

And then commercially, you have some progress, too. You do have the opening of water traffic along the Congo River. You’ve got some air traffic opening up out of Kinshasa into the east. And at least from what we could tell, the currency seems fairly stable. It hasn’t gone through a lot of inflation like a lot of other failing states.

But probably the most significant things are happening on the international level and, of course, it’s because of the near-failure that was happening in Ituri in May. But at least progress is showing now. You had the rapid response of France and the EU and then the enhanced MONUC II with the Chapter 7 mandate and augmented strength, and these things are giving hope to the people in the Congo.

And that probably was the biggest message. When we were there the first time last November, almost every Congolese person that we met came to us and said, “When is somebody going to come in and help us? When are the Americans going to come in and help us?” That was almost the first thing that people said to us.

Now, this last trip, people said, “We’re hopeful.” And we asked that question in every negative way that we could think of and it still came up “We’re hopeful,” so that’s changed.

That hope has to be put into context, though. There are still armed groups in the DRC. They have not put down their weapons. They have not stopped committing atrocities.

On October 6th, there were 65 killings outside of Bunia, 40 of those children, and according to OCHA there are more than 3,000,000 displaced people in the DRC right now.

There is a permanent displaced camp near Bunia outside the airport. It’s currently home to about 12,000 people. There are no amenities in these camps. Even things like soap are hard to find. So it’s 12,000 people in these situations here.

The war affected and is affecting everybody in terms of displacement. Some people had to actually flee their homes, flee their towns, flee their jobs like this man here who was a teacher in the town of Largu. He was not only the teacher. He was the administrator of the school. He left everything. He came to a town outside of Bunia, was taken in by people, and now works in the fields when work is available and when it’s safe to go to the fields.

Others like this man here decided to stay in their homes but frequently he’s driven to the forest at night for a couple of days at a time when rebels come into the area. And I point your attention to the hole in the door. That was the last time the rebels came. They shot through the door and wrecked his house while he was in the forest.

There are still child soldiers like this young boy here who was shot in the back and paralyzed for life and there are still children who are starving and who have very limited access to health care. According to OCHA again there are 31,000,000 people in the DRC who are affected by food insecurity.

Where there are facilities like this operating room there are shortages of surgeons. We met people in the hospital who had been there for six and eight months, some of them getting bed sores while they’re waiting for a surgeon to be able to come and work on them.

And being a patient, while you’re better off than the people who have no access to health care, you are totally dependent on family members to take care of them. This is the mother of a woman who’s been in the hospital for about seven months. Every day she comes and cooks three meals outside the hospital on the ground like this for her daughter.

And this is a Catholic sister who runs a day care center in South Kivu in Walungu. It’s a center for children who have disabilities and serious illnesses. A group of militia came into her place, tied her up, tied another sister up, pointed guns at them, and then stole about $100 from them that they were going to use to buy medicine for the kids. These types of things keep going on.

Country roads like this one here are the domain of the armed groups. These are the roads where the rebel forces, in this case the UPC, stop people, tax people, kidnap them for day labor or for weekly labor, and generally harass the populations.

So in response to Kofi Annan’s call for an interim force, the first of the 1400 French forces arrived, as I said, on June 6th. They came in under a limited mission, a limited mandate, and that was to protect the airport and to protect the town of Bunia, stabilize the town of Bunia. And they also had a limited duration. They came in in June and they were mandated to leave on the 1st of September.

Within the scope of their mandate they were successful. Now, a lot of people criticize them because they didn’t go outside of Bunia. They didn’t stop the killing outside of Bunia. There were a few instances of killing in the town. But within the scope of their mandate they were generally successful. They did stop the killing, as I said, with a few exceptions.

They opened access to other parts of Bunia that were previously closed and off limits. They forced the UPC out of the town except for a limited number of bodyguards who under an agreement they worked out with the French were allowed to stay there. And, most importantly, they didn’t upset the peace process going on in Kinshasa. They didn’t derail it.

They were successful for a number of reasons. First of all, they had a strong Chapter 7 mandate. That mandate was backed by a trained military force that had the capability and the equipment to impose that mandate.

They had the rapid reaction capability. It was essential that they could get in there as quickly as they did, six days after the resolution was signed. They had knowledge of African operations--most of the French who came in were Marines who had served in Cote d’Ivoire and in other operations in Africa so they knew the area of operation and they knew what to do.

Probably most important was their French language capability. It allowed them to communicate with the people on a social basis but also, from a military mission point of view, to be able to gather information from them officially by questioning them, and also just sitting in restaurants and overhearing. It was invaluable for them to be able to understand the language.

They also had other intelligence capabilities. We’re going to talk about this a little later because MONUC and the UN don’t have intelligence capabilities. But the French had the Mirage jets to help them with the arms embargo monitoring and they were able to on some basis monitor enemy radio communications to at least get an idea of what the rebels were up to.

On July 28th the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a Chapter 7 mandate for MONUC. And if you’re not familiar with Chapter 7 and Chapter 6, the easiest way to say it is probably that Chapter 6 is peacekeeping in the general sense of the word and Chapter 7 is peacemaking in the general sense of the word. It’s not as simple as that but that’s a good way to keep them apart.

The soldiers that we talked to, especially the Uruguayans who failed to react so many times, said now we’re free to anticipate a threat and to take care of it and not wait to be shot at. That’s what it meant to them to be under Chapter 7 rather than Chapter 6. The MONUC force was increased to 10,800 and they did indeed replace the French on September 1st.

I want to talk just a few seconds about the mandate because it covers an awful lot of things. First of all, all the things on this slide here were under the previous mandates, all of the mandates. The one that I’ve italicized, that and previous ones, were Chapter 7 mandates. Everything else was under Chapter 6. But with fewer than 5,000 troops, they never had the capability to go out and actually do any of these things in any aggressive way.

They also were given the responsibility for supporting development of the national government, the national police, and monitoring the arms embargo, which was a new part of this resolution.

And the resolution, the mandate called for a 3800-man combat force to stabilize, this time not only Bunia, but the entire eastern region. The bulk of the forces came from Bangladesh. Other countries: Pakistan, Uruguay, Indonesia and Nepal were also included.

Now instead of this 3800-man force, they’re talking about a 5,000-man force, which should be all on the ground by the end of November. The last of the Nepalese will be arriving then.

The plan is to stabilize and secure Bunia. That was their first priority. And, then, to start moving out to other points to open humanitarian access to the rest of Ituri.

The first phase actually started on 9 October and they’ve completed now deploying to the Bogoro, Marabo, and Iga areas. Their next planned outposts, some about 100-150-man outposts now, will be going out starting in about a week and probably by end of November start having those in place. Those are Aru, Mahagi, Pendroma, and Mangwalu.

Then the overall plan, and this is Ambassador Swing’s concept of operations, right now you’ve got troops deployed almost entirely in the western part and along the ceasefire line that no longer exists. His plan is to take those troops from those administrative areas where there are not contested areas and start moving them into this triangle, basically from South Kivu to Maniema, and up to Bunia. They have 10,000 forces in that triangle. About 5,000 of them are going to be the Ituri Brigade and 5,000 will be redeployed from within the rest of the country.

Now, a lot of people when we were there were saying that’s still not enough. There are hundreds of thousands of armed rebels in the area and things can change very quickly. MONUC probably will need more. MONUC’s position and Ambassador Swing’s position is if we need more we will ask for them, but we’re not ready to do that yet.

First of all, they say, we want to be able to show that we’re using our troops the way they should. But the point that MONUC keeps stressing is that regardless of how many troops are in the area, there can be no military solution to the problems in DRC and Ituri. The permanent solutions will be political. They will be with the government in Kinshasa. They will be with the assistance of the international community.

So we had a lot of recommendations that I reported. I just want to talk briefly about four of them. First is troop strength. We agree for the most part with Ambassador Swing’s assessment of the 10,800, but we also know that the situation can change very, very quickly there and when it changes it happens without warning and without time to start going through a UN procedure to start tasking the countries to bring in more people.

What we’re asking them to do is at least acknowledge this possibility and start going to the UN now with a contingency plan for how to get these people in much faster than they would if they just go through the normal system.

Second, I talked a little bit about intelligence and the fact that the UN has no intelligence capability and this is because none of the member nations wants to share their intelligence capabilities. When you share an intelligence capability and you make it known to a lot of people you lose it. It no longer is an intelligence capability.

Ambassador Swing is well aware of this and he’s working with the UN. What we’re really recommending to the other members of the UN is to work with Ambassador Swing, to work with MONUC, to figure out a way to share these assets. This cannot be an unachievable goal.

Third is the disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, and reintegration or resettlement {DDRRR] program. Nobody should have to memorize all five of those words. This is a program that has not taken off even though it’s been a priority since the beginning of MONUC. Now MONUC is saying, and rightfully so, that a lot of the responsibility for DDRRR isn’t theirs. For the troops outside of the Congo--Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi--those countries have to develop their own reintegration programs. But there are so many of these things that MONUC and the UN and the international community can influence even though it’s not under their direct responsibility.

And unfortunately what we found with MONUC was they’re content right now to wait and see what’s going to happen, wait and see if the national army develops, and then if people demobilize. But we couldn’t find any systematic plan that says they’re going to be ready if that happens. What if hundreds of thousands of these Congolese militia demobilize all of a sudden? What if all these child soldiers demobilize? Is there a program in place to take care of them? We saw lip service but we saw no plan and we think that they must be ready and start acting more aggressively.

And lastly the exit strategy, and we wrote a letter to Ambassador Swing about this, the exit strategy right now is that in two years there will be a national election and that should then be the end of MONUC.

We don’t see that as a realistic option. Look at what’s happening in Sierra Leone. In 2002, they had their elections but we still have more than 10,000 troops there from UNAMSIL because elections are just the beginning of the process. It doesn’t say anything about building up rule of law institutions. It doesn’t say anything about manning the civil police or getting government outside the capital to the other places.

So what we’re saying is, instead of tying the exit strategy to a date and to a single event, why don’t you have a phased plan. When the national army is deployed and X number are deployed in X areas in the east, then draw down the MONUC force appropriately. And when the national police are stood up and when they’re deployed and actually functioning and the people trust them, which is a huge issue, then drawn down MONUC a little more. And when you start having a practicing court sessions and other rule of law institutions, drawn down again. In this way, you can be tying the strategy to real accomplishments rather than to arbitrary events.

In closing, we think that the military and the political processes are on track. They’re moving in the right direction despite the fact that everybody said that the Bangladeshis wouldn’t be effective because they couldn’t speak French. They are being effective and the word we’re getting from the people in Bunia is that they appreciate their presence and they appreciate the fact that they see Hind helicopters flying over and they see the transport helicopters.

And even though they don’t speak French the kids took to them for whatever reason. So the Bangladeshis are trying to be tough, aloof but still gain the trust and I think that they are doing that.

For the first time since MONUC was established, it’s actually going to have the strength that it was mandated to have. It hasn’t had that the whole time. When it was 5700 they had 4600. When it was 8700 they had 5,000. But by the end of November they’re supposed to have and they will have the 10,800. That’s a huge thing.

With few exceptions that we saw, the other elements of MONUC were manned and mandated to help do what they were supposed to do. I’m talking about the human rights sections and the political offices and the child protection. All these areas except for DDRRR are geared up to do what they’re supposed to be doing.

And we talked to USAID and the World Bank and, once the programs are in place, they feel comfortable they have the money to start helping finance some of these advances. So this is all better news than we found the last time we were there.

But you have to be guarded in your enthusiasm for this. The process is very, very fragile. The people in Kinshasa have to continue to put the betterment of the nation above their own self-interest. This is a group that has put their self-interest above the lives of the people of Congo for a long time and turning that around is going to be hard.

Most of all what we’re concerned about is the UN and the international community. It’s an expensive operation and all the talk that we’re hearing is that they’re looking for a short-term answer to get out. That’s not going to work. All the progress that’s being made will revert, so staying the course with them is a huge thing.

So we’re hopeful, but we’re not there yet.

JERRY FOWLER: Thank you, Cliff. I said we were going to go from there to here but actually I think we’ll go straight to Learned. Hope you’re ready because Steve is going to hook his computer up because he’s got some audio-visual.

So Learned in particular works for civil society groups in Congo so it will be interesting to hear their perspective and what you’ve learned from them.

LEARNED DEES: Just as some background I will give you a sense of where I went on my trip and limit the discussion basically to one part of the country.

I went on a trip and visited Bunia, Kisingani, Kindu, Bukavu, and Goma. And I did that over a three- week period, focusing on looking at the changing political situation, first and foremost, and looking at what people saw their roles as members of civil society in a changing political situation.

The first thing that I noticed, and it surprised me, was how much progress has been made in the course of one year. I made the same trip exactly one year ago and came away ultimately almost without hope that the situation was so bad, that there was no remedy for the situation, that the international community really didn’t care, and that things would continue to go on and only get worse.

One year later when I arrived I’m surprised at how that analysis was starting with, I think, the international community’s role. MONUC is a representative view of the international community’s will in Congo and if it’s a strong mandate that means there’s a strong interest.

When I was there a year ago it was a passive mandate and I assumed it was a passive interest but that’s changed incredibly in the last year pretty much because the situation got so bad that the international community was shamed into doing something.

Regardless of that motivation it has made a real difference. The difference is that MONUC is there to enforce the will of the international community and it’s clear that the will of the international community is to end the conflict. So everybody out there is reading the political leaves. Which direction are we going? Is the war going to continue or is the war going to stop?

And I think almost universally whether people accept what they’ll get out of it the writing’s on the wall. The war is going to end as long as the international community continues to provide the resources necessary.

So that has affected the whole situation over the course of the year. I’ll give you three or four examples of how that aggressive involvement by the international community has had subsidiary impact.

Number one, on communication never before have I been able to pick up a phone in Kisingani and call anybody at any point in time. Now you can buy a telephone, a cell phone, that’s actually quite cheap and quite effective.

The South Africans are quite aggressive in what they see is a virgin market and they’ve set up their cell phone company all over the east but in particular in places where it’s difficult, like Kisingani. So you can imagine the ability to use a telephone to communicate not only within Kisingani but among people within the Congo and within the east in particular has had a big impact on just the circulation of information. If something happens in Kisingani you’ll hear about it within an hour or two just because there are telephones and that changes the dynamic.

I think the situation that happened maybe two or three weeks before I arrived was the whole alleged what was it, RCD split or whatever it was, I’m not sure how to characterize it but there was a faction with the RCD that wanted to restart the war. Well, that information was out, the reports were out, and they were forced to beat a retreat in part because of the communication facilities now at the disposal.

Related to that is the travel. I mean, now you have flights connecting you to Kinshasa and other points to the west frequently. So that means not only are ideas coming in but people are coming in. The ministers are coming in and it’s changing the political discourse, which is the third thing.

The idea that reunification is a train on the tracks moving forward is reinforced by the ability of people to actually come and visit and to say these things publicly. I was in Bukavu about a week ago and I saw that members of the President Kabila’s party were holding a rally in Bukavu and they were going through the streets in trucks with the flags. I think it’s blue and yellow, the political colors of his party, surely in defiance of the local leaders there who weren’t happy about that, but the fact is that they were having a representative from the party come to the airport in Bukavu. They were going to greet them and they were going to have a public rally. I also saw political activity in Goma. These things were not just possible last year so you see the political discourse has changed.

And people are reading the writing on the wall. Let’s face it. Politicians are opportunistic. They’re looking to see where they can go and what’s in it for them. So people are saying hmm, reunification. Ministers are coming. Military attaches are changing. Maybe I want to get on that train. So it’s changing from the top down, the dynamic about where the country’s moving, and that’s very important and very different from last year.

And the last thing is, of course, just the aggressive stance of MONUC. One of the contingents you didn’t mention, Cliff, but I think has an important role to play are the South Africans. They are the ones who have a lot of the equipment, the attack helicopters, and, quite frankly, from private discussions are anxious to use those things and that makes a difference because up until now people have not been afraid of MONUC.

In fact when I arrived in Bunia three days before some unknown rebel or militia folks actually attacked the MONUC camp to basically loot it. So that shows you how much respect they had that they were going to loot an armed camp of soldiers. So until those soldiers fired back and killed six or seven their belief was that they’re just toy soldiers. So that has changed and that will continue to change as long as the soldiers in MONUC actually are willing to do those things and the international community has said absolutely if you need to kill people who are not cooperating then that’s what you’ll do. And so that changes the political dynamic because before they were a joke, quite frankly, from the perspective of those who had guns and were willing to use them.

The human rights situation is still catastrophic, a war of cruelty for five years. A lot of it’s happened in areas where there are no reporters, there are no cameras, no communications, and, as the story suggested in the Washington Post Friday, I believe, we’re just discovering what actually happened.

The National Endowment for Democracy is a grant making organization. We’ve worked with a number of organizations that have focused for several years already on rehabilitating either victims of torture, victims of rape, and those centers have been full for two or three years. It’s only now that reporters are coming in and interviewing people that they realize this has been going on for two or three years, and so that situation hasn’t changed as rapidly as the political situation.

So there’s a connection certainly between the human rights situation and the political situation. One expects to see improvement in the human rights situation but currently with things moving in the political framework you have a lot of armed regular and irregular soldiers still causing havoc.

And on top of that the reading is that there are going to be some losers in this peace, and those losers are going to be among the people with guns. You have the folks who are from Burundi, you have the folks who are from Rwanda, you have the Mai-Mai, and you have the RCD soldiers.

So among those four groups there are going to be a lot of losers. There are really no incentives for them in victory, in peace. Peace is not victory for them. So as a result while I was there we saw a spike in violence against civilians, primarily by the Burundian forces, at least in South Kivu. As a result they’re going to be forced out of the country. What their fate is in Burundi no one knows but they are a destabilizing force and they continue to systematically rape women and attack civilians like they have for the last five years.

And this feeds into something Cliff said about the demobilization process. It’s a very difficult area because you have people who have a lot to lose and you have people who actually want to get out of the bush and give up being soldiers and those who are willing to give up the guns now really need programs which will allow them to be reintegrated into their communities.

Because the political situation has moved so rapidly one gets a sense that the UN, which is a large bureaucracy, isn’t ahead of the game. It’s a little behind the game. So you have a lot of people who would voluntarily if you had a camp today come and give up their arms. But you can’t just take their arms and call it a demobilization program because, number one, the experience in places like Kindu has been they’re rerecruited, sometimes forcibly, by others.

And, two, if they don’t have proper financial support then they’re stranded. They’re in a city, they have no means to survive on, and so what do they do? Eventually they go back to raping and pillaging.

So in order to have an effective program you have to have the resources and you have to have a program which calculates how much are you going to give them, where are you going to place them, and what sort of effective incentives do you have to keep them from being reintegrated back into any armed militia at any point in the future.

So one of the things happening is that MONUC is moving forward. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do but it’s behind the curve, and that has a big impact on whether you’re able to demobilize those first soldiers who were willing to give up their weapons.

One of the negative things that I did see throughout the east in almost all these cities that I mentioned that I visited was because of the five years of conflict, because of the possibility of political competition, particularly looking at election, there has been an increase in ethnic mobilization. In other words at some point you want to be the leader in a particular area. One of the natural ways is to rely on ethnicity.

So in Kisingani, for example, they have gone to the extreme where they have people who are known as how do I say it in English, people who are originally from an area and the distant people who are also originally from the area. In other words they’re dividing up we’re really from this physical place and you’re really from this general place so we should control Kisingani, for example.

And so this tendency for ethnic mobilization is a worrying problem because it’s only going to increase as elections become a real possibility. People are going to mobilize on a ethnic basis and whether that ethnic mobilization will be responsible has a lot to do with whether there’s ethnic conflict in a peaceful transition, and that’s a very worrying trend but a reality everywhere in the east as a result of five years of conflict.

The final point I would like to make and would like to get a lot of questions -- I’ve just thrown out a lot of issues -- is that clearly MONUC can’t be everywhere. There will never be enough MONUC soldiers to enforce peace even with an aggressive Chapter 7.

And I think Congolese are aware of that fact but coming to grips with what it means is difficult because a lot of the violence is happening in the places where MONUC is least likely to ever be. And so those zones of instability I don’t want to say could be permanent but that’s pretty close to the reality, that MONUC will never reach out everywhere. And so as a result if you’re motivated to do such you could have a little fiefdom of instability somewhere beyond the reach of MONUC.

I think that the point that I’ll end on is to go back to the original point, which is the political situation has progressed more than I ever imagined possible in 12 months and I’m someone who lived in the Congo from ’88 to ’91 and have been going to the Congo since then every year.

And the human rights situation in the Congo since that period of time has never been great, never been good, actually, but the political situation has improved in a manner that I just didn’t think possible. And so it leads me to believe that if the same level of international interest and attention is focused on Congo in the next year a similar leap in progress politically, and eventually for the human rights situation is possible.

So it does pay dividends and the last year is proof that international attention is critical to solving the crisis in the Congo.

JERRY FOWLER: Thank you, Learned. You raised some questions that I hope people will come back to in the discussion.

It’s interesting one of the things you say about your just not having hope a year ago. Many of you may know Charles Petrie (?), who was with the United Nations and spent actually a few years in the Congo, and I think he’s now in Afghanistan and he had been in Rwanda at one point.

But I was at a conference with him and someone made the comment of this is hopeless. And he was saying from our perspective as people who aren’t involved in this we don’t have the right to give up hope on behalf of the people who are there.

And that’s something that’s always stuck with me, and I think your comments underscore his point.

Stephen Smith has been negotiating ceasefires between various militias in Congo and will tell us more about that work.

STEPHEN SMITH: Thanks. My name is Steve Smith. I’m an independent consultant working on African policy issues. For the last three years myself and a group of four other people have been involved in a Track II diplomacy effort in the Congo and we participated with the three belligerents in a number of meetings in a number of formats.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. I’m going to talk specifically about issues in Eastern Congo. I’ll give you just my general view of the political situation in Congo and go directly --

(Interruption)

STEPHEN SMITH: -- as good as things are and I agree with my colleagues who are up here that there’s been tremendous progress made in the Congo and we’re much farther along than most people would have imagined a year ago.

However you should note, just a dose of reality, that the Congo does remain partitioned with the three belligerent groups still controlling the areas that they previously controlled. There are representatives from each of the main belligerents, from the MLC, RCD, Kinshasa, and some of the smaller splinter groups in Kinshasa now.

But one of the difficulties that they have is that they don’t engage the areas from which they came very well and so — occasion of an assembly of smaller areas under the control of warlords and others with lots of power and guns who for convenience come together and agree to be a part of a larger whole Congo, or are we going to have a Congo that has a political system that truly will for the first time in the life of any Congolese provide an opportunity for a democratic dispensation within that country in the best sense of the word.

Right now we have, as Learned mentioned, low-level fighting and continued human rights abuses in Eastern Congo. We continue to get reports from these areas and that’s probably primarily because so much of Eastern Congo still remains outside of any governmental control.

Even the RCD at its height never really controlled Eastern Congo. They controlled some of the major cities much as the Soviets did in Afghanistan control cities but they did not control the countryside and they certainly didn’t have the hearts and minds of the people.

And that continues. Over a period of four to five years what happened was you simply lost all control in Eastern Congo, any semblance of governance, allowing a lot of armed groups to come in and operate there freely.

So what’s been going on and what we’ve tried to do just in our small part is to assist a little bit with some of the local peace agreements that have been taking place in Eastern Congo. I was there over the summer and helped negotiate a cease-fire between one of the Mai-Mai groups led by General Padiri and the RCD just prior to the start of the transitional government.

So that was a successful agreement that resulted in an end to violence or at least it reduced the violence quite a bit in the area under his control. That’s the area around Shabunda (?) in South Kivu, and that’s, if you look here, in this area right here.

ow, those agreements are starting to spread. You’re seeing more and more local agreements being signed and MONUC is playing a very strong role in this right now, and that’s a very, very positive thing that MONUC is doing because for a long time MONUC would not get involved in some of these local disputes.

Prior to that they said their mandate was only the demobilization of the Rwanda Hutus and other militia from foreign countries who were in the Congo. Now they have taken the next step and are starting to address the problems of the militias within Congo.

I’ll go ahead and give you a few pictures here. This is from my trips. We started this effort exactly a year ago, in fact when Cliff was there. This was the first trip I made to see the Mai-Mai for General Padiri. This is on the road between Bukavu and Bunyakeri (?). Do you have anyone from Kivu here from Congo? So you know that road? So this was right in the Khuzibeaga (?) forest, and these guys are Mai-Mai fighters and at the time they were in control of about half of that road.

This is a map of the IDPs which you saw before with Cliff. Here is the area that we’re talking about, the troubled region of Congo, and the areas that I have been working and my team have been working in a lot has been South, North Kivu, and Maniema.

We had three peace building missions November 2002, almost exactly a year ago, when we started this initiative. It’s privately funded by foundations out on the west coast.

In May we had a grant from the US State Department and I went out there with a gentleman by the name of Robert Ricigliano. Some of you may know him. He was formerly head of the Conflict Management Group at Harvard and now is Director of Peace Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

And then in June and July we did a third private mission. The accomplishments that we had were discussions between the RCD Goma and the Mai-Mai led by General Padiri. Many of the Mai-Mai groups, including some of the most influential, Padiri and Masunzu Nakabakadunya (?), were indirectly informed of this.

We had a commitment by the RCD and Padiri to meet and establish a cease-fire, which they did. The results were a cease-fire and a commitment to future negotiations by the RCD Goma leadership and Padiri. General Padiri, by the way, is now in Kinshasa and has been named a Universal Ambassador of Peace and an envoy to Eastern Congo.

We have a cease-fire now in the area controlled by General Padiri and the cease-fire seems to be spreading and holding somewhat in South Kivu. And I point out this is only a cease-fire between Congolese. It does not impact the Burundians or the Rwandans. It’s only among Congolese.

And we demonstrated that this path was possible. There was a lot of skepticism within the UN this summer just up until the point where we had this final mission as to whether this would even be possible.

Our recommendations to everyone here would be support for informal dialogue in Eastern Congo. This is going to be a very long-term process. What I mean, long term, I’m thinking five, ten years.

What’s happened in Eastern Congo has been so traumatic it’s going to take a lot of work with the communities and with the demobilized soldiers in order to make this a success.

I think it can be a success because I think the Congolese really want peace in Congo and, as Learned said, they’re putting a lot of pressure on the politicians to make that happen. We ought to be supporting them in that and helping them through this demobilization process.

One of the things we have been strongly recommending is the establishment of conflict resolution centers in Eastern Congo. These conflict resolution centers, there’s a number of examples in other countries where these things are quite effective. They are places for people to come. They generally are built around projects, either learning or small business, sports, education, something concrete.

The one thing the Congolese continually repeat back to me is they are really tired of talking. They don’t want to talk any more. They just want to get busy doing things.

And then the demobilization has to be linked to the local economy. One thing that the NGOs and the UN have completely overlooked, at least up until now, is the private sector in Eastern Congo, and I’m thinking of the coffee plantations, the cattle ranches, and a number of other opportunities for large-scale employment. These operations employed a lot of people in the 1980s and it wouldn’t take that much to get them going again.

There are rotary clubs in Goma. There’s a rotary club in Bukavu and in other places. No one talks to them. The business people sit there. They’re in the restaurants with all the NGOs and no one ever tries to find out who these people are or what their capacity is to help.

Tere’s a few more pictures to just finish up with. This is a view of the forest in South Kivu. I always advise people to bring lunch with them when you go visit people in the forest who have been living there a long time. This is a large load of rice and beans. People are very, very hungry.

This is General Padiri and his senior staff, this guy right here, this young man in the suit. He’s in his mid-thirties, very dynamic personality. This is myself and Hans Romkema from the Life and Peace Institute who’s been doing a lot of local peace building work and again some of the general staff.

The current situation, this has changed somewhat since I wrote this but additional meetings between the Mai-Mai and former RCD military commanders are taking place on a regular basis. They’ve been facilitated by MONUC and the Life and Peace Institute.

That’s really important is that access is increasing in Eastern Congo little by little and it’s my hope that as access opens up, as soon as you get an opening, people need to fill that very quickly. They need to fill that void because if it’s not filled with something positive something negative will come in.

You can physically get someplace. You can go someplace where you couldn’t be before. There are places in Eastern Congo where people haven’t been in five years. There are places in Congo where people don’t have any clothes and people are sharing one old set of clothes in the village.

Security is still an issue and it’s a very serious issue and it’s one that you have to take a lot of thinking about before you go into some of these areas because even if you get a cease-fire between Congolese there’s still an awful lot of people out there who are not under control.

You have the Congolese bandits who are out there who are not under the control of any particular group. There are the Rwandan Inter — the Burundians and others so it still remains a very, very difficult place to work but it’s getting better.

These are some last three pictures. This is a meeting between former RCD and Mai-Mai facilitated by MONUC and Life and Peace. These are the former Mai-Mai folks. These guys are now all getting integrated into the Congolese government. And here are former RCD officers. It’s nice to see them with the blue epaulets and the yellow stars on their shoulders and everyone was very happy.

I had a long, long conversation with one of the senior Mai-Mai leaders and you could just tell how much they wanted this war to end. I think if I had to leave anything with you is an understanding that the Congolese are really and truly ready for this war to be over.